The (in)visible in Indian terrorism | Al-Jazeera

Indian Muslims are often accused of terrorist links, but in many cases it is Muslims themselves who are terrorised.

India's media often rushes to blame Muslims for acts of terrorism, sometimes without serious evidence [EPA]

According to the Indian government and media, many Muslim groups have recently been involved in terrorism. Of these, three stand out: Student Islamic Movement of India (SIMI), formed in 1976 and banned soon after 9/11 for fomenting “communal disharmony” and “sedition”; Deccan Mujahideen (DM), an outfit which shot to prominence by claiming responsibility for the 2008 Mumbai terror attack; and Indian Mujahideen (IM), a group believed to have been formed after 2001. These groups have been charged with killing hundreds of people. The latest attack came on July 13, when 20 people were killed in a series of bombings in Mumbai.

Shortly after the attack, the police said that IM and SIMI were behind the blasts. A nationwide hunt followed. According to Rakesh Maria, Maharashtra Anti-Terrorism Squad (ATS) Chief, expert teams fanned out to seven states. Officers from the National Intelligence Agency, formed after the 2008 Mumbai attacks to fight terrorism, raided the houses of two IM suspects in Ranchi, capital of Jharkhand state.

In Indian political discourse, outfits like SIMI, DM and IM appear as a threat to India’s stability and its global rise. While some depict them as domestic groups, others portray them as working in alliance with outfits from Pakistan. It is thus believed that IM was floated by Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), a militant group formed in 1990 in Afghanistan and active in Pakistan-controlled Kashmir. Most accounts of these outfits are, however, inconsistent and even contradictory.

By analysing the Mumbai attack and the alleged involvement of IM and SIMI, I make three arguments. First, since the media and the security agencies have a close and uncritical relationship, we should have a healthy doubt about the accuracy of their information, and refrain from immediately pointing fingers at one Muslim group or another. Despite the fact that barely anyone adequately knows what IM is and how it came about, after the July attack several Muslims were arrested as terrorists.

Second, because Muslims are blamed, arrested, tortured, and killed (by the police) after each terror attack, with little or no evidence, such measures might end up creating the danger the Indian state claims to fight.

Third, I contend that the Indian media’s role in “reporting” terrorism is prejudiced.

What is Indian Mujahideen?

After the blast, the police arrested many people from Mumbai’s “sensitive” (read Muslim) neighbourhoods, a practice the residents of such neighbourhoods have grown accustomed to in the last decade. One suspect, Faiz Usmani, died in police custody. The police claimed that his death was caused by “hypertension”; his family believes that he was tortured. Usmani was the brother of Afzal Usmani, in jail for his alleged involvement in the 2008 Ahmadabad blast. Both brothers are reported to be IM members.

Riaz Bhatkal, described as India’s “most wanted terrorist”, is regarded as IM’s founder. He became close with SIMI in the early 1990s when it began to radicalise. Born in 1976, Bhatkal went to an English-medium school and later studied engineering at a Mumbai college. But beyond that, much of IM’s history remains unclear. It's not even known whether Bhatkal is alive or dead. After the July 13 blast, the ATS attempted to nab him. This is surprising, because early this year the media reported that Bhatkal was killed in Karachi by Chhota Rajan, Mumbai’s underworld don.

The media provides differing accounts of IM’s formation and, in fact, is sometimes inconsistent even within a single version. For example, Animesh Roul, the director of the Society for the Study of Peace and Conflict in Delhi, claimed that IM was “conceived at a terrorist conclave attended by top leaders of the Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) and Harkat-ul-Jehadi Islami (HuJI) in Pakistani-administered Kashmir in May 2008”. He did not find it contradictory when in the next paragraph he wrote, “IM came into the open for the first time in November 2007”. In Asian Policy, Christine Fair indicated two dates of its formation: 2001 and an ambiguous date of “much later”. According to The Times of India, IM was formed in 2005. To Namrata Goswami of the Institute for Defence Studies and Analysis in Delhi, “key SIMI members …started supporting the idea of the formation of the IM as early as December 2007”.

IM first hit the headlines after a series of explosions in November 2007. In an email to the media and police, IM claimed responsibility for the blasts. As the email explained, the aim of those attacks was to protest against “the pathetic conditions of Muslims in India that idol worshippers can kill our brothers, sisters, children and outrage dignity of our sisters at any place and at any time and we can’t resist them”. Then, in 2008, minutes before the blasts in Ahmadabad, IM sent an email (entitled “The Rise of Jihad, Revenge of Gujarat”) to the media saying: “We hereby declare an ultimatum to all the state governments of India … to stop harassing the Muslims and keep a check on their killing, expulsion, and encounters.”

The messages are a sign that IM’s aim is to protest against and avenge the killings and humiliation of Muslims at the hands of Hindu nationalists and the state administration. The destruction of the Babri mosque by Hindu nationalists in 1992 is important to IM’s ideological repertoire - hence its description by the media and the terrorism experts as a “home-grown”, “domestic” terror outfit. Since the media regard the Babri mosque as a domestic issue (unlike Kashmir, which is international) and the IM invokes the Babri mosque to rationalise its attacks, the IM is thus considered a domestic outfit.

However, many Indian security experts hold that IM is a tool of Pakistan’s Inter-Service Intelligence (ISI) used to destabilise India. In these accounts, IM is a means to advance ISI’s agenda of destabilising India and at the same time to exonerate Pakistan of any allegations made by India and the West of promoting terrorism. The logic of the security experts is that the word “Indian” in IM points to India’s domestic groups, rather than Pakistani groups like Lashkar-e-Taiba, through which the ISI has been operating in Kashmir. On the other hand, experts like B Raman allege that IM and SIMI's reach extends beyond South Asia, characterising the groups as a part of a global network of Islamic radicals without furnishing adequate evidence.

India’s Guantanamo Bays

The media invariably base their stories on the sources of the state. An apt example is Praveen Swami, a terrorism expert cited by everyone writing about the IM. Swami is to print media what Arnab Goswami (of Times Now) is to Indian TV: Their views are rabidly nationalist, some might even say Islamophobic. Swami reproduces the police version (e.g. see his writings in CTC Sentinel, May 2010; The Hindu, Edit-Page, March 22, 2010; and Frontline, June 2-15, 2007) without giving the other side of the story, namely: the viewpoints of the alleged terrorists, their family members, or the Muslim community. It is well-known that the Indian police are biased against Muslims and have been complicit in killing them, as was evident in the state-mediated 2002 Gujarat violence, in which 1,000 Muslims were killed.

Given that the Indian media is uninterested in reporting “facts” and multiple views, can an anthropologist like me make sense of the mediatised world of terrorism? Thomas Eriksen holds that a concept like globalisation has “no meaning to an anthropologist unless it can be studied through actual persons, their relationship to each other and to a larger surrounding world”. I thus agree with Peter Van der Veer that “behind the growing visibility [of media] is a growing invisibility”.

What is rarely visible in the Indian media, however, are the brutal, illegal methods used against suspected terrorists: torture cells, illegal detention, unlawful killings in “police encounters”; elimination of evidence against the illegal actions of the law-enforcing agencies; and rampant harassment of Muslims. In July 2009, The Week reported on the existence of at least 15 secret torture chambers meant to extract information from the detainees. The methods to extract information include attaching electrodes to a detainee’s genitals as well as the use of pethidine injections. To quote The Week, these chambers are “our own little Guantanamo Bays or Gitmos”, which a top policeman called “precious assets”.

In May 2008, a Muslim boy aged 14 was abducted by the Gujarat police. He was dragged to the police car at gunpoint and taken to a detention centre where he was tortured. He returned home ten days later when the court ordered his release following his mother’s petition. The police subsequently threatened the boy’s family with dire consequences if they pursued the case in court. The police harassment becomes even more acute in light of the fact that most lawyers often hesitate to take up the cases of “terrorists”. As a disempowered community - as the government-appointed Sachar Committee report (of 2006) minutely demonstrates - Muslims themselves don’t have adequate and qualified lawyers to pursue such cases. Muslims’ marginalisation thus renders their voice invisible in the media too.

It is believed that after SIMI was banned, soon after 9/11, its radical members formed IM. During my fieldwork (2001-2004) on Jamaat-e-Islami and SIMI I did not hear anything about IM. SIMI activists and other Muslims I met felt terrorised themselves. It is worth noting that since 2001 far more people have been arrested as “SIMI terrorists” than the actual number of SIMI members, which in 1996 was 413 (when founded in 1976, SIMI’s members numbered 132). Until today, the Indian government has still not legally proved its rationale for banning SIMI.

The story untold

In the fight against terrorism, evidence and the rule of law are subservient to prejudice. As of this writing, the Indian government has not yet tracked the perpetrators of the July 13 attack. However, only two days after the attack, Subramanian Swamy, a prominent politician and former minister (with a doctorate from Harvard University) wrote an article called “How to Wipe Out Islamic Terror”. Without any evidence, he blamed Muslims for the attack, in the same way that The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Sun suspected Muslim involvement in the Norway shooting nine days later.

What Swamy did is standard practice in Indian media. In September 2006, a blast killed 35 people at a Muslim graveyard in Malegaon (in the state of Karnataka). The media blamed Muslims. Likewise, in 2007, after a blast killed 10 Muslims praying in Hyderabad’s Mecca mosque, Praveen Swami freely wrote about the Muslim terrorists he believed caused it and about what he perceived to be the “Islamist threat to India’s cities”. However, investigations later showed that Hindu nationalists carried out the Malegaon and Mecca mosque terror attacks.

Returning to Subramanian Swamy, Swamy wrote: “We need a collective mindset as Hindus to stand against the Islamic terrorist. The Muslims of India can join us if they genuinely feel for the Hindus. That they do I will not believe unless they acknowledge with pride that though they may be Muslims, their ancestors were Hindus”. Those refusing to acknowledge this, Swamy advocated, “should not have voting rights”. He proposed declaring India “a Hindu Rashtra [state]”.

Stories of Muslim terrorists abound in both the Indian and Western media. Since the July 13, 2011 Mumbai bombings, vitriolic pieces like Subramanian Swamy’s have appeared frequently in the media. These pieces subtly influence the analyses of many liberal intellectuals.

By contrast, stories portraying Muslims as the terrorised remain fairly sparse. One wonders if, and how, such stories will be told.

Irfan Ahmad is a political anthropologist and a lecturer at Monash University, Australia and author of Islamism and Democracy in India: The Transformation of Jamaat-e-Islami (Princeton University Press, 2009) which was short-listed for the 2011 International Convention of Asian Scholars Book Prize for the best study in the field of Social Sciences.


The views expressed in the article are the author's own and do not necessarily represent Al Jazeera's editorial policy.

‘Tip of the iceberg'

Interview with Khurram Parvez of the JKCCS.

Khurram Parvez: “The question is why the authorities breached the law. It amounts to criminal negligence.”

KHURRAM PARVEZ is the programme coordinator of the Jammu and Kashmir Coalition of Civil Society (JKCCS). He was also a member of the International People's Tribunal on Human Rights and Justice in Kashmir (IPTK), which prepared a report titled “Buried Evidence” on Kashmir's mass graves. Excerpts from an interview he gave Frontline:

What do you think about the SHRC report on unmarked and mass graves?

We welcome the inquiry report of the SHRC's police investigation wing. It comes as a vindication of our research. After we published our reports “Facts Under Ground” and “Buried Evidence” , we were accused by the security forces of maligning them. A case of sedition was filed against two of our members. This report is just a beginning – the tip of the iceberg. We hope that the SHRC will carry its investigation beyond these 38 graveyards in three districts of north Kashmir. Unmarked graves and mass graves exist in all districts of the valley and also in Poonch, Rajouri, Doda, Ramban and Reasi districts of Jammu province. By the way, these are not just unmarked graves. There are mass graves too. The SHRC report has identified 18 mass graves in 38 graveyards. In our report, we had identified 42 mass graves in 62 graveyards.

Did you expect such an investigation from the SHRC, since it was ultimately done by its police wing?

Honestly, we didn't expect it, given the past record of state institutions in Jammu and Kashmir.

Are these graves necessarily linked to the missing people in Kashmir?

Yes, these unmarked graves and mass graves are linked to disappearances. In 53 cases of exhumation conducted by the state, which we submitted to the SHRC, 49 were found to be local civilians. One was identified as a local militant. All these people had disappeared from their homes, and the armed forces had killed them in fake encounters, claiming that all of them were foreign militants. The SHRC report has documented 574 cases in which people branded as foreign militants were buried after alleged encounters; but later, they were identified as local residents. Why were these people buried instead of their bodies being handed over to their families? Isn't it clear that the state authorities were hiding something?

The police and the military forces have been maintaining that since a large number of militants infiltrated in the early 1990s, they could be even non-state subjects and not necessarily those killed in custody?

The people buried in these unmarked graves could be anybody – civilians, local militants or foreign militants, but what records does the state have to prove that these were foreign militants? It has not maintained any identification profile to prove who they were. According to legal procedures, the police are expected to maintain photographic evidence, DNA profiles, fingerprints and post-mortem reports. The question is why the authorities breached the law. It is not mere negligence, it amounts to criminal negligence.

Chief Minister Omar Abdullah has said his government will not cover up the issue….

He says he will not allow a cover-up. But he has earlier said that unmarked graves are a normal phenomenon in rural Kashmir. By saying so, he undermined the credibility of the state institution that endorsed our viewpoint that these unmarked graves are of those dead who were handed over by the police to the local community for burial.

There are conflicting reports about the number of disappeared people. Human rights activists say the number is over 8,000, but documentation is available for not more than 500.

For us, figures are immaterial. We are not fighting to prove figures; we want the state to acknowledge the phenomenon of enforced disappearances and begin delivering justice in the individual cases. Enforced disappearances are not a phenomenon of the past. This year, a 21-year-old boy was a victim of enforced disappearance. We are working to create a situation where the right to not disappear is respected. According to our estimates, around 8,000 people have disappeared.

You have said there are mass graves in other parts of Kashmir too. Is that true?

Yes, Poonch, Rajouri, Doda, Ramban, Srinagar, Ganderbal, Budgam, Kulgam, Anantnag, Pulwama and Shopian also have many unmarked graves and mass graves.

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India's moral defeat in Kashmir

State brutalisation puts the fear of the arbitrary in everyone, gradually making all Kashmiris potential victims.

A system of state brutality - marked by thousands of nameless graves - reigns in Kashmir [Showkat Shafi]

In the early 1990s, I had a long conversation with a former Kashmiri militant. Among other things, I asked him why he had given up. He did not, or could not, go beyond inchoate answers that hovered around fear, disillusionment, uncertainty, and so on.

There was one thing, however, that struck me as significant, thought provoking and ultimately disturbing. He said he was grateful to the authorities that he had not been killed in custody. He had spent a few nights in a local prison when he was picked up by the armed forces a year or so after he had given up. His family feared for his life, so they went on a frenzied campaign to save him, and they did succeed in getting him out alive. In Kashmir many do not, as we witnessed in the recent custodial killing of 28-year-old Nazim Rashid in the town of Sopore in central Kashmir.

At the time, I did not fully register the import of what the former militant had said. Here was someone, even though a former combatant, who had come to believe that it was routine for the state, the government as he put it, to kill him while in their custody. He was grateful for not having been killed extra-judicially.

In other words, he had accepted the perversion of the idea of justice, and also of the moral and legal order, in his life - as well as in the world around him - and come to accept, and then believe, that was the normative relationship between the state and its subject.

The state, in this case the Indian state as it operates in Kashmir, does not execute this relationship only through the stated mechanism of coercion, extraordinary legal provisions such as those black laws AFSPA (the Armed Forces Special Powers Act) and PSA (the Public Safety Act), which mock the very concept of legality. It also employs deliberate legal, moral and technical obfuscations to do so.

'Acts of mass murder'

Nearly 20 years later, this kind of brutality by the state continues unabated, and a damning testament of it was on display last year in a particularly barbaric and almost ritualistic performance of state power when the men who run Kashmir decided that the most effective way to deal with unarmed protesters on the street was to shoot them dead.

There are clear statutes in international law that apply to the treatment of civilian protesters and prisoners in conflict regions - the killings of 2010 may not go to The Hague, but there were what could be seen as 'acts of mass murder' throughout the summer of that year. It is also important to remember that no one has been held accountable, let alone punished for any of those murders, which by itself is a shameful indictment of the state's behaviour. And that is one of the many consequences and expressions of the abnormal structures that the state employs to deal with dissent and enforce normalcy - no one is held accountable, and therefore no one among those who wield the reins of power feels responsible even for mass murder.

Perhaps that is why no one ever resigns in places such as Kashmir. Immunity (the word assumes a horrific meaning in the official lexicon of conflict) guaranteed by draconian legal structures is all pervasive, and cushions everyone in the military-police structure, right down to the level of the most ordinary functionary of the state.

This is how you have a state that kills the mentally handicapped Ashok Kumar in the border district of Poonch, claims he was the divisional commander Abu Usman of the LeT (Lashkar-e-Taiba), provides a detailed press release about the long encounter, and when the truth about a premeditated murder is revealed, does not even bother to put out an apology. No cogent explanation of the murder or answers to rudimentary questions are offered - such as if it was a 'goof up' (a term used by some sections of the Indian press) why did they make it a point to claim that it took 12 hours to kill this 'militant'?

But then Kashmir has witnessed many instances of premeditated murder, also known as 'fake encounters' - a term reminiscent of Bollywood gangland-speak. And barring one instance of a punishment amounting to termination of active service in the case of the Machhil 'fake encounter' of April 2010, and a few police officials serving prison terms, no one from the armed forces has been punished for any of the murders in Pathribal (2000), Ganderbal (2006), Lolab (2004) and other cases before that.

The language of conquest

On the street, then, amidst a brutalised people who are expected to behave normally as an acquiescent citizenry, the state that wants the world to believe that Kashmir is an integral part of India is often found speaking the language of conquest. Martin Luther King's 'arc of the moral universe' does not bend towards justice in places such as Kashmir, it does not even begin to stir, because the compass is not still - it is comatose.

How does this almost completely dehumanised 'conflict management' (for neither India nor Pakistan have demonstrated any serious intent to resolve the dispute) impinge on the lives of ordinary people, and what are its goals with regard to the aspirations of those people?

The perpetrator of violence, whether by immediate personal choice or as part of a system that allows the executor to live in moral comfort or comfortable moral ambiguity, wants the victim to "renounce all claims to asserting his identity". This is essentially what violence, torture, brutality are meant to do. To reduce a person, a mind, and consequently a collective of minds, to a "spiritless body". And that, then, is what a repressive regime in Kashmir, an oppressive ruler in Arabia, or an occupying super power in Afghanistan, ultimately seeks to achieve: the complete destruction of the will of the victim, which in turn ensures a people kept in submission, slavery even.

And if you factor in other mechanisms of subjugation, for instance, turning people into willing or unwilling accomplices and collaborators, you have a well-oiled, thriving security or police state in which moral and legal insanity becomes the norm. And so we arrive at a former militant who is grateful that the state did not kill him in prison.

In the 1990s, the Indian state put in place a system of brutalisation to crush the armed revolt in Kashmir. As a prerequisite to that horrific state of affairs marked by thousands of nameless burials , littered corpses, street massacres and notorious torture chambers (Papa II in Kashmir was Abu Ghraib before Abu Ghraib became Abu Ghraib), a suspension of moral and legal order is necessary. That is how the case for dark emergency laws, reminiscent of the worst dictatorial regimes of the last century, becomes acceptable to the agency imposing it. Again, in the case of this state, these bulwarks of tyranny not only become acceptable but, as a general of the Indian army would have us believe, also tenets from a 'holy book' .

This then gradually makes everyone a victim, and in my reckoning, worse, a potential victim. Fear is the overarching thread here. Apart from a handful of members of the elite and collaborators needed to check the governance box, everyone is a victim. Some directly, others indirectly. Brutalisation, beyond the immediate goal of crushing people's aspirations or an armed revolt, means putting the fear of the arbitrary in everyone. 'Anything can happen to you – anytime,' the state seems to say to the common Kashmiri almost all the time. As the family of Nazim Rashid, the latest victim of custodial murder in Kashmir, found out.

Nazim was found dead in Sopore on July 31; a case has been lodged, a few low-ranked policemen have been arrested, the autopsy report has found evidence of torture - and yet the Indian state and its representatives in Kashmir have not admitted any responsibility for a murder that was committed under their watch. People will remember this, record a dirge for yet another extinguished young life, and wonder, first with frustration and then with fury, how hard it can really be for a gargantuan police state that sometimes resembles a loose Alcatraz, to deliver justice.

A personal conflict

One of the concerns of my work, both in fiction and outside of it, is to examine how the perpetrator of such random and ruthless violence objectifies the victim. This is germane to all conflicts between the powerful and the weak: The perpetrator has to 'otherise' the victim - how else does a member of the security forces come to bludgeon a nine-year-old to death, as we saw in the killing of Samir Rah in Srinagar last year?

And conflict is very personal. When you grow up in Kashmir, you are troubled by some very fundamental questions: Why are my people being killed? Why am I in this crackdown? And why do they always use expletives when they talk to you? When a member of the armed forces talks to you, you are never addressed normally. You are always a 'maderchod' or 'behanchod'. Even an 'abeyy' would be honourable. Therefore, you see, you feel, you think, and even walk differently once you have witnessed your share of the brutality in play.

During my first year in Delhi, I was once walking near Pragati Maidan when I saw a Delhi police vehicle parked on the roadside. Instinctively, I started to run, to look for a place to hide.

That to me is complete brutalisation of a people. Apart from occasional shootings by unknown gunmen, and genuine battles between the armed forces and militants (it is hard to tell in the haze created by the fake 'encounter mafia' that rears its head from time to time); there is only one kind of terror that chills the hearts of parents of young men in Kashmir - the terror of the man in uniform.

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Kishanganga hydel power project threatens an ancient culture

The Dard Shin tribe of Gurez, speakers of the Shina language, are to be uprooted to Srinagar. But what is a pastoral hill community to do in the city, asks Iftikhar Gilani

Imagine the kind of uproar civil society and rights groups would have created had the Centre decided to shift the indigenous Jarawas from their native Andaman and Nicobar Islands to New Delhi. However, no such noise has been made so far even as the Dard-Shina tribe, said to be the last of the original Aryans living in the remote Gurez region is being robbed of its hearth and home. The tribal community will be relocated to Srinagar, making way for the 330-MW Kishanganga hydro-electric project in Kashmir. Away from the high-profile land acquisition cases of Bhatta Prasaul and Nandigram, this scenic place on the north-western tip of the Valley has hardly had anyone crying foul after the Centre announced relocation plans.

Since there is no land in this heavily militarised region close to Line of Control (LoC), the Government has decided to rehabilitate the tribals to Srinagar. Hyder Ali Samoon, a sub-inspector, a resident of Badwan village looks at his ancestral house with a sense of foreboding. The water from the dam will submerge what has been home to him and his ancestors. Pointing towards a nearby graveyard, where his ancestors lay buried, Samoon tells his sons and grandsons to engrave and store images of the house and the picturesque beauty of the village in their minds so that they can, at least, pass on their heritage to the future generations.

Nearly 300 families belonging to three villages of Badwan, Wanpora and Khopri are being relocated to Srinagar city. Against their peers across the Kanzalwan mountains in Bandipora, these villagers are getting a compensation of Rs 5.75 lakh per kanal (a unit of area). The farmers in Bandipora, on the other hand, with more fertile lands are being paid only Rs 2.25 lakh per kanal. Why this difference? Divisional Commissioner of Kashmir Asghar Samoon, who incidentally was touring the area, told TEHELKA that Gurez tribes are being paid more because they are not only losing land but also their culture, civilisation, and will probably become extinct over the next few decades, thanks to the hustle and bustle of Srinagar.

The controversial Kishanganga project, which envisages diverting water from the Kishanganga river through tunnels to the Wullar Lake in Bandipora district of Kashmir Valley has not only come to focus due to Pakistan’s opposition invoking the clauses of the Indus Water Treaty (IWT) to complain against India to the World Bank but the project has drawn enough attention to itself for being ambiguous about its nature. What is intriguing is that the National Hydel Power Company (NHPC) officials have kept the voluminous environmental assessment report of Kishanganga undertaken by the Centre, for Inter-disciplinary Studies of Mountain and Hill Environment, close to its chest. Not only has it refused to share it with the state government, but it also did not accede to the request of former Water Resources Minister Saifuddin Soz, when as a minister he wanted to see the report, before it went to the Cabinet.

The Rs 3642.04-crore power project will displace 362 families and consume a total of 4280 kanals (535 acres) of land. The Centre and the NHPC’s move to relocate the displaced families outside Gurez Valley were influenced by several factors. For instance, land in the mountainous valley is very limited. Some 27 revenue villages, inhabiting the region with a population of 31,900 (latest census) houses around 26,000 troops. Total land under Army occupation is 2802 kanal, out of which 918 kanals are unauthorised. Out of 1883 authorised occupation, the Army provides rent for 1140 kanals. The LoC fencing has consumed 339 kanals.

The local magistrate of Gurez Mohammad Ashraf Hakak said that the only land that was available on the foothills of mountains was prone to avalanches. Therefore, the Government, with the help of the NHPC, decided to shift the affected families to Mirgund, around 16 km from Srinagar.
At the core of this rehabilitation exercise stands the Dard Shin tribe of Gurez. Speakers of the Shina language, the rare tribals will be cut off from their culture, livelihood and roots if moved to Srinagar. Many historians and anthropologists claim that the Dard Shin people are pure Aryans.

For more than six months Gurez remains cut off from the rest of the world. Until Jammu and Kashmir was divided between India and Pakistan, Gurez was part of the Gilgit state.

“Relocating people outside Gurez is an attempt to divide and rule the people of Gurez,” said the chairman of J&K Dard-Shin tribal minorities, Mir Hamidullah. Unhappy with the plan, he said that in order to preserve their culture and language, the people of Gurez should be provided land and rehabilitated in Gurez itself. “Shina language is the mother of Sanskrit. We are a people with our own history and relocating our people outside Gurez will hurt the community,” said Mir.

Apart from jeopardising their cultural identity, the move to rehabilitate them will also risk the state of cultivable land in the area, which will be shrunk further by the dam. “This project will affect whatever little agricultural land is left in our village,” said Abdul Khaliq Ganie of Tarbal, the last village near LoC, about 20 kms from Gurez town. “We have been losing our cattle to the minefield areas every year, and now this project has added to our worries as this village remains cut off from the Kashmir Valley for most part of the year,” he added.

Known for its scenic beauty, Gurez is separated from the Valley by the north Kashmir mountain range that runs west of Zojila Pass. For more than six months Gurez remains cut off from the rest of the world. Until Jammu and Kashmir was divided between India and Pakistan, Gurez was part of the Gilgit state. The taxes would be paid at Drass, which happens to be the only area on this side of the LoC that shares its language, culture and customs with Gurez.

The compensation being offered to the people for their homes and land, the locals say, is too little. “They are giving me one lakh rupees for one kanal of land, but how am I going to survive on this little amount along with my nine children,” rued a resident of one of the affected villages in Gurez.

According to civilian officials, the NHPC has promised (under the new relief and rehabilitation plan) to pay Rs 5.57 lakh to the families whose houses will be affected by the project and construct a new house per household outside Gurez. The powerhouse will be located in Kralpora village of Bandipora. Waters from a fast flowing Kishanganga—from Teetwal to Gurez—would be stored at Gurez and diverted to the Bandipora power station. The water will then go into the Bonar Madhumati and eventually flow into the Wullar Lake.

“Shina language is the mother of Sanskrit. We are a people with our own history and relocating our people outside Gurez will hurt the community,”

Pakistan has raised objections over the water diversion part of the project as it believes the inter-tributary transfer amounts to a violation of the IWT of 1960. Pakistan is worried that the diversion of the river will leave thousands of acres of its rice fields, fed by Neelum (that’s what Kishanganga is known as in Pakistan) dry, and impact Mangla Dam and the viability of its upcoming Neelam-Jhelum power project.

Environmental experts say that the rise in water level of Kishanganga will adversely affect the ecology of Gurez, submerging substantial plantation and leaving an impact on its agricultural land and wildlife. The dam will also affect the breeding cycle of trout fish, found in Kishanganga. “There will be no breeding of trout fish because of this dam as they need fast running water to breed,” said an official from the fisheries department. The dam will also lead to an extreme winter in Gurez, which already has a long winter, as the river will freeze because of the dam, some experts said. “There is a danger of floods too as the water level increases and this will affect other adjoining villages as well,” revealed a government official.

However, despite many pitfalls, work on the power project continues on both sides of Gurez and Bandipora. The Hindustan Construction Corporation (HCC) has been allotted the EPA contract by NHPC for implementing the project. An amount of Rs 269.96 crore has been spent until March 2010, sources said.

Conceived in 1996, the work on the project began in 2007. HCC is constructing a 37m-high rock-filled dam, and a 23.50 km headrace tunnel to take water to three turbines (110 MW each) for generating 1,350 million units of energy a year. The HCC, last winter, spent a crore on the helicopter service to reach the dam site in Gurez.

In addition to the various problems associated with the project, the HCC has been accused of discriminating against Kashmiri engineers and employees. The HCC authorities, locals alleged, are forcing families in the affected villages to vacate their houses and land even before providing them with compensation.

“The affected families are asking the HCC authorities to give compensation before they vacate their lands,” said a Kashmiri engineer working for the HCC site in Bandipora. “People of Kralpora, which is the most affected village, were recently beaten up by the HCC authorities for protesting and demanding land compensation,” he added. The HCC and NHPC officials, however, refused comment.

Local labourers alleged that they are paid less than the outsiders. “NHPC did not employ the people from the villages that will be submerged because of the dam. They should have been given preference, but the project authorities brought employees from outside the valley,” a government official said.

The region with its unique history is littered with gems of archaeological interest. Archaeologists believe that there are many sites in Gurez, which have inscriptions in Kharoshthi, Brahmi, Hebrew and Tibetan. Experts are of the opinion that an archaeological investigation of Gurez valley will give further insight into the history of the Dard Shin people and about Kashmir in general.

Incidentally, Gurez valley falls along the section of the ancient Silk Route, which connected Kashmir valley with Gilgit and Kashgar. Archaeological surveys in valleys north of Gurez along the Silk Route, particularly in Chilas, have uncovered hundreds of inscriptions recorded in stone. The Kishanganga project will also affect this route, which has traditionally been crucial for trade in Central Asia. One of the three villages that will also be affected by the project is Kanzalwan, which is believed to be an archaeological site of historic importance. The last council of Buddhism is said to have been held in this village, and further down the stream, the ruins of ancient Sharada University lie preserved along the Neelum.

The toll the project is going to take on the local population is heavy. It will mostly hit people who are entirely dependent on agriculture and allied activities for their livelihood. “Those families whose livelihood is entirely dependent on agriculture will be affected more as they have to look for other avenues of employment after their land compensation is exhausted,” said a government official in Gurez.

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PaK leader leaves for Srinagar to attend wedding

Sultan Mehmood Chaudhry, the former premier of Pakistan-administered Kashmir, today left on his first visit to the Jammu and Kashmir to attend the wedding of a friend's son and to meet Hurriyat leaders.

Chaudhry, a leader of the ruling Pakistan People's Party, was issued a visa by the Indian High Commission to visit Srinagar to attend the wedding of the son of his close friend Zahoor Ahmed Shah Watali.

He flew from Lahore to Delhi this afternoon and will travel to Srinagar tomorrow, one of his aides told PTI. During his stay in Srinagar, Chaudhry will meet representatives of the Kashmiri community and leaders of the All Parties Hurriyat Conference, the aide said. This is the first time that such a senior leader from PaK is visiting the Indian side and the visit will provide an opportunity for interactions and exchange of ideas, the aide said.

Chaudhry is one of the leading Pakistan-based Kasmhir lobbyists.He was continuously elected to the PoK Assembly during 1985-2006. Watali, a leading businessman of Srinagar, has invited other political leaders from PaK, including Muslim Conference chief Sardar Attique Ahmed Khan, to his son's wedding to be held on September 17.

British parliament debates Indian Held Kashmir

In a significant development, the first of its nature, a general debate was held on Kashmir in the House of Commons, in London, on Thursday.

The debate was initiated by a conservative MP, Steve Baker, who demanded that an International Commission should investigate the human rights violations in Jammu & Kashmir, KMS reported. Referring to an Amnesty International report MP Baker said, each year hundreds of people are held under the black law, Public Safety Act without charge or trial with many exposed to higher risk of torture and other forms of ill-treatment. tabling the motion, Mr Baker said, we should be strong advocates for the rights of Kashmiris.

A Labour MP, Shabana Mahmood maintained that the Kashmir dispute had turned into one of the most dangerous conflicts in the world, which needed urgent attention. She said that the suppression of an uprising in Indian Occupied Kashmir had led to grave human rights violations.Several MPs including lan Austin, Jonathan Lord and Andrew Griffiths said that the right to self-determination was the only way to resolve the dispute.

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